about the events, successes, and people studying creative writing in Clara Belle Williams Hall at New Mexico State University.

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Reading Series 2013

NMSU's Nelson/Boswell Distinguished Writers Series this year features all graduates of our program who have gone to publish books, edit magazines and presses, and labor in the fields of literature. For the season finale, author David Shields (not an NMSU graduate) will be reading from his new book, How Literature Saved My Life. Faculty members Carmen Smith and Rus Bradburd also will read from their new books. Smith from Goodbye, Flicker, on September 7th, and Bradburd from Make It, Take It on February 15th. All readings feature a graduate student reader and begin at 7:30 in 106 Hardman Hall unless otherwise indicated.

Darlin Neal September 28th

Darlin’ Neal is a native New Mexican and author of the story collections Elegant Punk (Press 53, 2012) and Rattlesnakes & The Moon (Press 53, 2010). She is the 2011 winner of DH Lawrence Fellowship from the Taos Summer Writers Conference, their highest honor. Her short stories, essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in numerous journals, magazines, and anthologies, including The Southern Review, Shenandoah, Eleven Eleven, The Mississippi Review, Puerto del Sol, and Best Of The Web. Neal is a Mississippi Arts Commission awardee in the Literary Arts, and a winner of the Henfield Prize. As a graduate student at NMSU, she was a Frank Waters Fiction Fellowship recipient. Her first collection, Rattlesnakes & The Moon, was nominated for numerous awards including The Story Prize and The Pen Faulkner Award. Her short stories and nonfiction have been nominated over a dozen times for the Pushcart Prize. She serves as faculty advisor for The University of Central Florida’s award winning undergraduate literary magazine The Cypress Dome, and for The Writers In The Sun Reading Series for which she brings in writers of national caliber each semester. She is Fiction Editor of The Florida Review.

Richard Yañez--October 18th

Richard Yañez was born and
raised on the U.S.-Mexico border. He is the author of Cross Over

Water: A Novel and El Paso
del Norte: Stories on the Border, both published by the University

of Nevada Press. Named a
2012 Top Ten “New Latino Author” by Latino Stories, both books

were cited as “Notable
Books” by Southwest Books of the Year. El Paso del Norte was a finalist

for the Steven Turner Book
Award from the Texas Institute of Letters, and Cross Over Water

is a finalist for a ForeWord
Book of the Year Award (multicultural fiction) and an International

Latino Book Award (Best
Novel-adventure/drama in English).

His stories and
essays are anthologized in Mirrors Beneath The Earth: Short Fiction by Chicano
Writers, Our Working Lives: Stories of People and Work, Hecho en Tejas: An
Anthology of

He has served as
editor for Puerto del Sol, Colorado Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review,

BorderSenses, Momotombo
Press, and the Writer’s Chronicle. His service work includes

contributions to the Border
Book Festival, Con Tinta: A Chicano/Latino Writers’ Collective, El

Paso Literary Fiesta, and
RIPPLES Literary/Cultural Series.

A graduate of
New Mexico State University and Arizona State University, he earned a Riley

Scholar Fellowship from
Colorado College and a Center for InterCultural Leadership Fellowship

from Saint Mary’s College
(IN). Currently, he is an associate professor of English at El Paso

Community College, where he
received the Minnie Stevens Piper Professor Award and a state

teaching award from The
National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development.

He lives in El
Paso with his wife, Chicana writer Carolina Monsiváis, and their son.

Patrick Donnelley October 18th

Patrick
Donnelley is a native New Mexican and the author of The Charge (Ausable
Press, 2003, since 2009 part of Copper Canyon Press) and Nocturnes of the
Brothel of Ruin (Four Way Books, 2012). Donnelly is director of the
Advanced Seminar, one of three summer programs at The Frost Place, a
poetry conference center at Robert Frost’s old homestead in Franconia, NH. He
is an associate editor of Poetry International, a contributing editor of
Trans-Portal (www.transtudies.org), has taught writing
at Colby College, the Lesley University MFA Program, and the Bread
Loaf Writers' Conference. In the 2012-2013 academic year he will teach a
semester each at Smith College and George Washington University. He was
Thornton writer-in-residence at Lynchburg College in 2006, is a 2008 recipient
of an Artist Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, is a member of
the Massachusetts Poetry Outreach Project Advisory Board. His poetry has
appeared in many journals, including American Poetry Review, Ploughshares,
The Yale Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and Hayden’s Ferry
Review, and has been anthologized in the Four Way Reader #2, The
Book of Irish American Poetry from the 18th Century to the Present, and
elsewhere. From the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, he received a scholarship
in 2003 and a fellowship in 2004, and grants from the PEN Fund for Writers in
2000 and 2001. With Stephen D. Miller, Donnelly is co-translator of the
Japanese poems in The Wind from Vulture Peak: The Buddhification of Japanese
Waka in the Heian Period, a scholarly history and analysis
forthcoming from Cornell East Asia Series in fall 2012. Donnelly and
Miller’s translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Bateau, Cha: An
Asian Literary Journal, Circumference, thedrunkenboat.com,
eXchanges, Inquiring Mind, Kyoto Journal,Mead, Metamorphoses, New
Plains Review, Noon: The Journal of the Short Poem, Poetry
International and Like Clouds or Mists: Studies and Translations of Nō
Plays of the Genpei War. Donnelly, in previous years, has performed as an
actor and opera singer, worked as a professional chef and food writer, helped
to coordinate a meal program for people with AIDS, cancer and heart disease,
and taught health-supportive cooking and eating to senior citizens and people
recovering from drug and alcohol addiction. His spiritual curiosity has led
him, at different times, to study for the Roman Catholic priesthood and to live
as a Buddhist and a Muslim.Website: http://web.me.com/patricksdonnelly

Krystal Languel November 5th

Krystal Languell is the author of the poetry collection Call
the Catastrophists (BlazeVox, 2011), the poems of which began as her MFA
thesis at New Mexico State University. Her poems have appeared in Barn Owl
Review, DIAGRAM, esque and elsewhere, and her reviews and interviews have
been published online at NewPages and Coldfront. Founder of the
feminist literary journal Bone Bouquet, she is part of the Belladonna
Collaborative in Brooklyn and teaches writing at the Borough of Manhattan
Community College and Pratt Institute.

Andrew Scott November 30th

Andrew Scott is the author of Naked Summer, a story
collection, and the editor of a forthcoming anthology, 24 Bar Blues:
Two Dozen Tales of Bars, Booze, and the Blues. He holds writing degrees
from Purdue University and New Mexico State University, where he was twice
awarded a Frank Waters Fiction Fellowship. His fiction and nonfiction have
appeared in Esquire, Ninth Letter, The
Cincinnati Review, Mid-American Review, Glimmer Train
Stories, TheWriter’s Chronicle, and other
publications, and have been awarded grants from the state of Indiana and Ball
State University, where he teaches. With his wife, writer Victoria Barrett, he
edits Freight Stories, an online fiction journal. He lives in
Indianapolis.

Carrie Murphy January 18th

Carrie
Murphy is the author of a full-length collection of poetry, PRETTY TILT
(Keyhole Press, 2012) and a chapbook, MEET THE LAVENDERS (Birds of Lace, 2011).
She received her MFA from New Mexico State University and her BA from the
University of Maryland. Her work has appeared in Columbia Poetry Review,
JMWW, PANK, and other journals and has also been nominated for a Pushcart
Prize. An essay was chosen as an Editor's Choice for Best of the Net 2011. Murphy
also leads workshops at Washington D.C. area conferences on post-confessional
poetry. She is also an active food writer on the web.

Valerie Fioravanti February 1st

The stories in Valerie Fioravanti’s Garbage Night at the Opera
are grouped around an extended Italian-American family sharing one apartment
building in Brooklyn as their neighborhood experiences a swift and financially
devastating deindustrialization. The collection examines the consequences the
loss of factory jobs has on individual, family, and community life. The stories
move forward in time and across generations as the neighborhood rapidly
deteriorates, languishes for a generation, then gentrifies.

Garbage Night at the Opera won the 2011 G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction and is
forthcoming from BkMk Press (University of Missouri-Kansas City) in October
2012. Garbage Night at the Opera was also a two-time finalist for the
Flannery O’Connor Award. Stories from the collection have received four Pushcart
Prize and one Million Writers Award nominations. These stories have appeared in
North American Review, Cimarron Review, Hunger Mountain,Night
Train, and other literary journals. The title story, “Garbage
Night at the Opera,” was awarded Special Mention in Pushcart Prize
XXVIII, and has been anthologized twice more. A first-generation college
student, Valerie received a Fulbright Fellowship to Italy to work on her
novel-in-progress, Bel Casino, and won both the Fiction & Poetry
Prizes as an MFA candidate at New Mexico State University.

Valerie also writes poems and essays. Her first published poem,
“Letter Ghost,” received a Pushcart Prize nomination. Her essays and poems have
appeared in Eclectica, Silk Road, Jelly Bucket, and other
literary journals. Valerie teaches for the UCLA Writers Program online and
lives in Sacramento, where she promotes the work of other writers via the
Stories on Stage reading series.

John Chávez March 15th

John
Chávez grew up in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and spent a significant amount of
time in southern Colorado and Northern New Mexico, the inspiration for his
early poetry. He received his bachelors degree in Creative Writing from
Colorado State University, and later received his Master of Arts at Central
Michigan University and Master of Fine Arts at New Mexico State. He completed
his Doctorate degree in Poetry under the supervision of Hilda Raz. At the
University of Nebraska Lincoln, Chávez served as an editorial assistant for Ted
Kooser's "American Life in Poetry," a syndicated newspaper column
publishing contemporary poetry nationwide, and as one of two Senior Poetry
Readers for Prairie Schooner. Awarded a month-long residency at the
Anderson Center in Red Wing, Minnesota, Chávez was the Letras Latinas
Residency Fellow, cosponsored by the Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary
Studies and the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame.
His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Conduit, Portland
Review,Puerto del Sol, Grist: The Journal for Writers, The
Laurel Review, Palabra, Great River Review, Diode and Copper Nickel among
others. He is the author of the chapbook Heterotopia, published by Noemi
Press in 2004, and co-author of the chapbook I,NE: Iterations of the Junco,
published by Small Fires Press in 2009. His first full-length poetry collection,
City of Slow Dissolve, will be
released fall 2012 by University of New Mexico Press.

Joey Nicoletti April 5th

Joey Nicoletti is the author
of three poetry collections: Borrowed
Dust, Earthquake Weather (NightBallet Press, 2012), and Cannoli Gangster, which was selected as
a finalist for the Steel Toe Books Poetry Prize by Denise Duhamel (Word Tech,
September 2012). His poems, reviews, and nonfiction essays have appeared in
many magazines and anthologies, including Italian
Americana, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Waccamaw, Aethlon, Gradiva: International
Journal of Italian Poetry, Tulane Review, PIF, Green Hills Literary Lantern,
The Bitter Oleander, Stymie Magazine, and The City of Big Shoulders: An Anthology of Chicago Poetry. A short
film, "Blue Train,” based on his poem of the same name, will be screened
with five other short films inspired by poems from the new anthology Token Entry: Poems of the New York City
Subway later this year as part of Jack Feldstein’s Subway Series. A
graduate of the Sarah Lawrence College MFA program, the University of Iowa, and
New Mexico State University, he is a former poetry editor of Puerto del Sol and currently teaches
creative writing and English literature at Niagara University.

David Shields April 19th

David Shields is the author of thirteen
books, the most recent being How
Literature Saved My Life, forthcoming in February
2013 by Knopf. His other books include Jeff, One Lonely Guy, which was
co-written by Jeff Ragsdale and Michael Logan (forthcoming from Amazon
Publishing NYC on March 20, 2012); Reality
Hunger: A Manifesto (Knopf, 2010), named one of the best books of
the year by more than thirty publications; The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead (Knopf,
2008), a New York Times
bestseller; Black Planet: Facing
Race during an NBA Season, a finalist for the National Book Critics
Circle Award; Remote: Reflections on
Life in the Shadow of Celebrity, winner of the PEN/Revson Award; and
Dead Languages: A Novel,
winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. His essays and stories
have appeared in the New York Times
Magazine, Harper’s,
Esquire,Yale Review, Village Voice, Salon, Slate, McSweeney’s,
and Utne Reader; he’s
written reviews for the New York
Times Book Review, Los
Angeles Times Book Review, Boston Globe, and Philadelphia
Inquirer. His work has been translated into fifteen languages.